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On Fri­day, the US Trea­sury De­part­ment Of­fice of For­eign As­sets Con­trol (OFAC) an­nounced the is­suance of two gen­er­al li­cences that al­low Shell and BP to pro­ceed with near-bor­der and cross-bor­der de­vel­op­ment the Drag­on and Cocuina gas fields.

When Venezuela is­sued a li­cence in Jan­u­ary 2024 bind­ing the Drag­on gas field to Trinidad and To­ba­go’s com­mer­cial gas sys­tem, it was wide­ly framed as a diplo­mat­ic break­through and an en­er­gy se­cu­ri­ty tri­umph. In the nar­row le­gal sense, that was true. But in the deep­er in­sti­tu­tion­al and eco­nom­ic sense, the li­cence did not cre­ate a project. It closed one.^1

Drag­on did not ar­rive on Trinidad’s hori­zon as a dis­cov­ery. It ar­rived as a ma­ture, heav­i­ly worked off­shore as­set whose ge­ol­o­gy had been proven for decades, whose wells had al­ready been drilled, whose pipelines had near­ly been laid, and whose mon­eti­sa­tion had been re­peat­ed­ly de­layed not by en­gi­neer­ing fail­ure but by shift­ing mar­kets, geopol­i­tics and in­sti­tu­tion­al de­sign.^2